and when
she put away her puppets and talked of them learnedly and with
understanding--instead of letting them explain themselves, as several
great novelists have been content to do--he recalled how Wisdom crieth
out in the street and no man regardeth her, and perceived that in this
case the fault was Wisdom's own. He accepted with the humility of
ignorance, and something of the learner's gratitude, her woman generally,
from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet. But his sense of sex was strong enough
to make him deny the possibility in any stage of being of nearly all the
governesses in revolt it pleased her to put forward as men; for with very
few exceptions he knew they were heroes of the divided skirt. To him
Deronda was an incarnation of woman's rights; Tito an 'improper female in
breeches'; Silas Marner a good, perplexed old maid, of the kind of whom
it is said that they have 'had a disappointment.' And Lydgate alone had
aught of the true male principle about him.

Appreciations.

Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a
handful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books--('on several
occasions')--that 'it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as
treatises, or treatises disguised as novels'; that, 'while less romantic
than Euclid's Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving
reading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of
genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously
described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand _plus_
Science and _minus_ Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as
'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The
comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the
grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and is not unkind.

BORROW

His Vocation.

Three hundred years since Borrow would have been a gentleman adventurer:
he would have dropped quietly down the river, and steered for the Spanish
Main, bent upon making carbonadoes of your Don. But he came too late for
that, and falling upon no sword and buckler age but one that was
interested in Randal and Spring, he accepted that he found, and did his
best to turn its conditions, into literature. As he had that admirable
instinct of making the best of things which marks the true adventurer, he
was on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing f